Reading books is sometimes a duty. So is reviewing them and arriving at judicious judgments about their achievements and deficiencies. Both reading and reviewing can become a pleasure, however, when books make us feel better about our world. This is no small gift at times when all the news seems bad, all the responses to it are gloomy, and despair hangs in the air. In this foursome I have chosen very different books that each in its own way arouse hope.
Dave Witty, What the Trees See: A Wander Through Millennia of Natural History in Australia, Monash University Publishing.
Dave Witty, On this Ground: Best Australian Nature Writing, Monash University Publishing.
In What the Trees see and in his collection of articles in On this Ground, Dave Witty pays close attention to the natural world and shares his delight in its variety and resilience. He and the contributors to On this Ground also grieve the ignorance and carelessness that have led to its stress and destruction. Their attentiveness sows the seeds of hope in celebrating such a beautiful world and committing ourselves to its preservation.
What the Trees See
Dave Witty, author of What the Trees See and editor of On this Ground, looks at Australian history from the perspective of trees. His inspiration for the book was grounded in the challenges he faced in making sense of Australia when he first moved here from England. He fell in love with trees, delighting in their messy variety and grieving their diminishing numbers. In the book, he takes the reader on a journey around Australia, noticing and describing the single trees that once were everywhere, celebrating trees that have lived for more than a thousand years, and lamenting the thoughtless clearing of trees.
Adopting the long perspective — one that goes back to a time before European settlement of Australia — enables Witty to contrast the respect for trees shown by Indigenous cultures with the later ignorance of the European settlers, who saw their value as building material and cleared them for agriculture. If the book is a threnody for loss, it is also a celebration of memory, both human and arboreal, and of the ubiquity and incredible variety even within a single genus of trees.
The book itself enacts respect for trees in their individuality and not just in their collectivity. Witty refers to each species of trees by its Latin name, giving it appropriate formal dignity. Perhaps the